March 2017

March 30, 2017

Best known as J. Peterman, Elaine’s boss on Seinfeld, John O’Hurley performs his show at the Café Carlyle as if he were that character projecting his outsized personality on an intimate stage. He’s cornered the market on “arrogance and pomposity,” he is quick to point out, as if those were a virtue, and then he launches into “Mr. Clown,” a song he uses to begin and end his hour and a half set. Waxing nostalgic, he reminisces about schooldays when his best friend told he had the worst voice, to later times when Frank Sinatra said he sounded good singing Sinatra: Joe Raposo’s “There Used to be a Ballpark,” the song that wooed Frank, works pretty well for the rest of us too.

March 28, 2017

A genuine Holocaust era heroine, Antonina Zabinski could charm a tiger. Now her story is a major motion picture: The Zookeeper’s Wife, based on Diane Ackerman’s 2007 book on this historic figure has everything: animals in mortal danger, an excellent cast led by Jessica Chastain as Antonina, Daniel Bruhl as Lutz Heck, Der Fuhrer’s chief of zoos with a scientific agenda in sync with the Nazi desire for pure breeds, and an imperiled young boy, Antonina’s son Rys. Action packed, the story based on Antonina’s diary of that time, is a nail-biting account of the Warsaw occupation and the miraculous efforts of non-Jews, smuggling their friends out of the ghetto, risking their lives to help Jews survive.

For those still pondering how we got to Trump in the White House, “Sweat,”Lynn Nottage’s play just opened at Studio 54 for this Pulitzer Prize winner’s Broadway debut, and a prescient view of our collective political plight. “Sweat” gives poignant voice to a disenfranchised microcosm of the American heartland, as if Michael Moore’s Flint, Michigan had taken center stage, featuring a fine ensemble under Kate Whoriskey’s expert direction. Kudos to John Lee Beatty’s set design, for a bar in inviting reds, a mecca where birthdays are celebrated and the closing steel mill mourned. It’s “Cheers” with less cheer, with characters of limited career options and a variety of ethnicities when in 2000, the doors of opportunity slam shut.

March 22, 2017

The inspiration for Suzanne Vega’s show at the Café Carlyle is decidedly literary, the Southern writer Carson McCullers, author of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Ballad of the Sad Cafe. Vega, a consummate songstress known for her signature songs, “Luka” and “Tom’s Diner,” crosstown and far from the Carlyle on 112th Street and Broadway, claims she’s lived in all the New York neighborhoods except the really nice ones. At the Carlyle, she has arrived. Most important, she finds the uplift in Carson McCullers, singing about her rivals in “Harper Lee,” with snarky snipes at Virginia Woolf, Katherine Anne Porter, Truman Capote, and Lee, the author of only one book. “I’d like to kill more than that mockingbird,” she quips in Carson’s voice. No matter the jealousy at the heart of the writerly persona, in “Lover, Beloved” and “Carson’s Last Supper,” songs she wrote with Duncan Sheik, Vega asserts her muse’s theory of transcendent love: “the love of my life is humanity.”

March 14, 2017

If you are going to honor Susan Stroman for her achievement in performing arts, as Guild Hall did this week at their annual gala at the Rainbow Room, you may expect, aside from the usual clip reel, some real live Broadway stars. Laura Osnes, a sublime Cinderella, now preparing for the opening of Bandstand, sang the Gershwin classic “But Not For Me.” And Tony Yazbeck, dazzling in On the Town, to star in Stroman’s next musical, Prince on Broadway, sang Gershwin's “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.” Among many highlights on this special night, was Tanya Gabrielian’s rendition of Chopin's Nocturne in C-sharp Minor, Op. Posth. on piano, and poetry from Alice Quinn, Executive Director of the Poetry Society and Philip Schultz, another of this year’s honorees. “Poetry asks us to celebrate our differences,” said the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, and he read a new poem about a same-sex couple called “The Kiss.”

March 13, 2017

Cries from Syria, a documentary on HBO, tells such a horrific story, unfortunately the one you know if you’ve been paying attention to Syria, its government’s military efforts against protestors, use of chemical weapons on its citizens, and general violation of human rights. The regime claims it is protecting the country from terrorists. Most often the victims are children, and it is through their voices director Evgeny Afineevsky tells this untoward recent history bringing viewers up to date with Syrians relocating to European countries where they are shunned, and children wishing to return home. Introducing the film at a special screening last week at the Council on Foreign Relations, Sheila Nevins appealed to the audience: “Please, let’s change this.”

March 12, 2017

A photo exhibit at the Film Society of Lincoln Center features color stills from the set of Fellini’s 8 1/2, the maestro’s last film in black & white. Photographer Paul Ronald shot them as an aside while he was shooting black & white production stills, and of course, as these things go, the cache was lost—and now found. Glorious Anouk Aimee, and Marcelo Mastroianni seated in profile, waiting, perhaps for his next scene. Curated by Sam Stourdze, the show will stay up till summer, as the Film Society is now planning to screen a Mastroianni retrospective. Back in the day, Mastroianni came to Lincoln Center for the New York Film Festival. Following a press screening, reporters and critics surrounded him, begging for autographs. “But you are the press,” he said gesticulating wildly, reminding the crowd of its place. Icon that he was, he would not tolerate this breach of decorum.

March 10, 2017

Starring a charismatic New Orleans based investment mogul, Sidney Torres’ new series on CNBC, The Deed, shows how to invest in real estate. In the second episode, a building contractor named Russell, the son of a real estate agent, wants Sidney to invest in his project, but does not want to follow his advice. Sidney really wants to mentor Russell, but Russell seems to have a mind of his own about how to invest in properties, and you see the young man chafing, his ego bruised, as Sidney proves him wrong, about details of paint, floors, and especially pricing. Just before the episode aired, I had a chance to talk to Sidney about his show. He called his time with Russell a failure, but it sure makes for good television.

In the stunning revival of Tennessee Williams’The Glass Menagerie at the Belasco Theater, Sally Field’s smothering St. Louis Depression era mom Amanda Wingfield, exudes the nervous energy of a woman in compulsive command. Her son Tom, Joe Mantello, our narrator, is the butt of verbal abuse. We can see why her husband left this family high and dry sometime before the events of this memory play, abandoning not only this mother and son, but a girl, Laura, crippled with a limp in Williams’ script, but here played by newcomer Madison Ferris, mostly in a wheelchair, and when not, moving about bravely on hands and knees. This choice of actress is a reason that this Glass Menagerie makes you rethink a play you thought you knew. Stretched to abstract extreme by director Sam Gold whose vision this production realizes, the play’s traditional sitting room is gone, replaced by a bare cavernous stage; the whole, including a visit by an affable gentleman caller, Jim O’Connor, a perfect Finn Whittrock, is left to the imagination.